FREE Email Newsletter

Adam Levine, M.D., an emergency medicine physician with Rhode Island Hospital and a volunteer physician with International Medical Corps, was deployed to a field hospital near Misurata, Libya, during the conflict there. He and his colleagues cared for over 1,300 patients from both sides between June and August 2011.

Heart transplant patients who receive new organs before the age of 55 and get them at hospitals that perform at least nine heart transplants a year are significantly more likely than other people to survive at least 10 years after their operations, new Johns Hopkins research suggests. Examining data from the more than 22,000 American adults who got new hearts between 1987 and 1999, researchers found that roughly half were still alive a decade after being transplanted and further analysis identified factors that appear to predict at least 10 years of life after the operations.

Nomann Merchant,Associated Press
Years after Jacques Roy started filing paperwork that would have made his practice the busiest Medicare provider in the U.S., authorities say they've found most of his work was a lie.
They accused Roy of "selling his signature" to collect Medicare and Medicaid payments for work that was never done or wasn't necessary.

A two-year effort to prevent infections in children healing from cardiac surgery reduced sternum infections by 61 percent, a San Antonio researcher recently announced. Faculty from UT Medicine San Antonio carried out a new infection-control protocol for 308 children who underwent sternotomies at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Children's Hospital between 2009 and 2011.

Nearly one in three women who have breast cancer surgery will need to return to the operating room for additional surgery after the tumor is evaluated by a pathologist. However, a new service at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center cuts that number drastically by having pathologists on-site in the operating suite to assess tumors and lymph nodes immediately after they are removed.

Lindsey Tanner, AP
More Americans are turning to the emergency room for routine dental problems — a choice that often costs 10 times more than preventive care and offers far fewer treatment options than a dentist's office, according to an analysis of government data and dental research.

A plastic surgery procedure has helped some patients with migraine headaches, but so far relatively few plastic surgeons are performing migraine surgery, reports a study in the March issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery , the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

The immune system protects from infections by detecting and eliminating invading pathogens. These two strategies form the basis of conventional clinical approaches in the fight against infectious diseases. In the latest issue of the journal Science , Miguel Soares from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal) together with Ruslan Medzhitov from Yale University School of Medicine and David Schneider from Stanford University propose that a third strategy needs to be considered: tolerance to infection, whereby the infected host protects itself from infection by reducing tissue damage and other negative effects caused by the pathogen or the immune response against the invader.

Simultaneous targeting of two different molecules in cancer is an effective way to shrink tumors, block invasion, and stop metastasis, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have found—work that may improve the effectiveness of combination treatments that include drugs like Avastin.

(AP) — A Turkish hospital says the world's first quadruple limb transplant has failed. Hacettepe University says doctors had to remove two arms and two legs that were transplanted on 27-year-old Sevket Cavdar because of tissue incompatibility.
Doctors attached the limbs on Cavdar on Friday night.

Maria Sudekum, AP
Tattoos have long served as fashion statements, but a small number of Americans are now relying on them for the more practical, potentially lifesaving purpose of warning first responders about important medical conditions. Some medical tattoos are being used to take the place of bracelets that commonly list a person's allergies, chronic diseases or even end-of-life wishes.

(PRNewswire) Ethicon Endo-Surgery, a provider of advanced surgical solutions for minimally-invasive and open procedures, announced today the results of a study suggesting that video-assisted thorascopic surgery (VATS) wedge resections are associated with significantly shorter operative times, shorter lengths of stay and lower hospital costs than open wedge resections for lung cancer indications.

(PRNewswire) A surgical team at Beaumont Hospital in Troy has performed Michigan's first single-incision, robotic-assisted gallbladder removal surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy). Led by Bruce McIntosh, M.D., chief of General Surgery, the team removed the gallbladders of three local patients through robotic surgeries that required only a belly button incision of less than one inch.

(PRNewswire-USNewswire) Texas Children's Fetal Center is proud to announce the birth of Charlotte, the team's first patient to undergo in-utero surgery for the treatment of spina bifida. Charlotte's mother went into labor nearly 11 weeks after fetal closure was performed, and delivered Saturday evening by cesarean section.